


Ligature

by SeaOfBones



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Everything is unrequited, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Multi, Pre-Time Skip, Prom Night, fluff & gentle melancholy, looking at everyone's closest unit stats and realising nobody matches up, there can be no possible act two spoilers because i'm literally not there yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 09:51:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20207779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeaOfBones/pseuds/SeaOfBones
Summary: It's the night of Garreg Mach's ball, and nobody is getting what they want. Because Lorenz likes Marianne, Marianne likes Byleth, Byleth likes Claude, and Claude… Claude likes secrets.





	Ligature

Marianne always sat at the back of the class. Lorenz considered that to be a shame. He thought the back of her head was her most beautiful feature. The elegant, complicated braids she wove into her cornflower blue hair, revealing her delicate, noble neck, and the careless locks that tumbled free of her work.

He had thought it a flaw at first. The untidiness, the way she wouldn’t remake her braid or pin the stray hairs. She would surely have had servants available for such things at her father’s house, but had apparently forsaken them, given that her reputation for being so strange and unkempt was known to House Gloucester before Lorenz departed for Garreg Mach.

But now he found them captivating. Marianne, the beautiful wilderness. Lorenz felt there was something refined in how he felt when he looked at her. A noble’s righteous appreciation of nature, a feeling of the sublime, the way the Goddess’ hands moved through every blade of grass on every field in Fódlan.

Lorenz had looked for that blue hair at the ball the night before. Checking the corners and corridors, the places Marianne was likely to be hiding, waiting for a gentleman to offer their hand and invite her to dance. Leonie had dared to laugh at him. He had asked her to dance in what he saw as a strange revenge. People would pity her, surely, her steps so clumsy and common compared to the aristocrat who led her in dance. Nothing like Marianne at all. He had danced the rest of the evening, changing partners, deigning to laugh with his schoolfriends, and though he looked, didn’t lay eyes upon her all night.

\---

Byleth had found her praying at the Goddess Tower. He reminded Marianne of the night sky, still and dark. They watched her bird fly out through the night breeze, the moon casting a pallid glow across their faces, their fingers.

The thought of someone asking her to dance at the ball had made her feel nauseous. She couldn’t imagine anyone doing so as anything other than a cruel joke. And then everyone watching her. She had only come so Hilda would stop asking, and run as soon as she could.

Byleth had asked if she wanted him to pray with her, but she hadn’t wanted to tell him what she was wishing for. He knelt with her anyway, under the silent stars.

Marianne had been afraid of him at first. Quiet, grim, always covered in blood. But Marianne liked that he always had time for their class. That he felt safe, his hands steady whether they held blade or book. That he always asked after Dorte, when she didn’t know what to say.

Most of all, Marianne liked that Byleth never laughed. It meant she’d never have to worry that he might laugh at her.

Byleth had walked her back to the dormitory and stalked off into the night, talking to himself. Marianne watched the night-darkness swallow him from her window. Byleth reminded Marianne of the night sky, that comfortable void. She turned her lamp off and lay on the bed, and imagined that the darkness was water and that she was drowning in it.

\---

Claude had smiled wicked things at him, when they first met. Byleth had seen how that smile didn’t reach his eyes, but hadn’t cared. Byleth’s smile never reached his eyes either. A smile had been a polite thing he wore when Jeralt was speaking to a client. Until it wasn’t.

And Claude had been just another pretty noble, until he wasn’t. He guessed Claude had gotten what he wanted – the strange, aloof mercenary acting as his class’ tactician – because he’d backed right off. He wasn’t Byleth anymore. Just _Teach_, just _Professor_.

Byleth was more impressed than anything, really. Any ideas he’d had about being smarter than nobles, of never wanting for anything he hadn’t been promised in writing – Claude had slipped right past them, dark curls and honey voice. He had liked him because he was funny, because he was cute, because the idea of spending a year looking after the other nobles had sounded a lot more like a chore.

Jeralt thought being at the monastery had changed him. Byleth supposed it had. He could barely remember what it had felt like, his hesitation to even teach here.

In the past, they’d have left town the next day, and he would have forgotten Claude von Riegan’s name within the week. Instead, they were both still here. And Claude was still here, his strange friend, whispering schemes to him and laughing like they were confidantes. Turning up at his room at odd hours of the night to show him old papers he’d found, and ask if he had any secrets. Making a show of bowing grandly, and asking him to share a dance at the ball.

Claude von Riegan’s smile made promises Byleth knew it wouldn’t keep. His words, though, he would follow, at least to see where they went.

\---

Claude checked the time. In five minutes, he would go back to the ball and make a big show of getting Edelgard to dance with him as a grand show of inter-house unity. Nobody would notice he’d slipped out. Gold letters glittered across the bookshelves in the candlelight, flickering as Claude’s hand passed over them. Fingers probing for spaces, anything loose, papers hidden between volumes of _The Noble Families of Fódlan_.

Most likely Tomas had cleared out everything useful before he left. But Claude couldn’t stay away, especially not the night the faculty would be busy chaperoning students at the ball.

Maybe Tomas had left a purposeful misdirection, and Claude could try to find out what he was doing from where he was being led. Maybe Seteth had missed something, the answer to all of his nouveau riche questions about the old world.

Surely there had to be something he could do other than wait. He only had a year at Garreg Mach, before his life would be chewed up by whatever demands the Alliance had for House Riegan’s heir. If there was a time to sneak out, read illegal books and make strange discoveries, it had to be now.

But as much as he searched, reached into the darkness at the back of the shelves, ran his grasping fingers along the dust-coated highest shelves of the library, Claude found nothing. Snuffing out his candle and feeling his way along the walls, he snuck back to the ballroom.


End file.
